I’ve seen some with hydraulics. Now those look/sound super fancy.
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I tend to think if something is in good shape and functional, but out of date, you are unlikely to benefit from remodeling in order to sell the house. It might price younger buyers out of the market, and the change you make might not be valued by a buyer who would almost certainly make a different design choice with their own dollars.
If you are capable of doing the work yourself, probably you come out ahead, but anyone can pay a third party to remodel things.
You pretty much never get your money back from a remodel. You’ve got to do it for your own enjoyment & benefit. That’s where you get the return. Financially, it makes more sense to let the new owner do the updates. They also get to pick out what they want that way, too.
But I will say this - when we were looking at houses, one of them had such a hideous paint job that we just couldn’t overlook it, so we never really considered that house. “Curb” appeal (even when you’re standing in the kitchen…or entry way as it was in this case) can be a powerful emotion.
I have to say I like both the Deep Purple and Space Lobster kitchens and am jealous and would take either. But between the two I prefer the Deep Purple natural wood look.
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There are two things I dislike about them.
One is that the machinery takes a lot of space. When I got the bathroom vanity, I put a drawer from an old all-wood dresser side-by-side with the new soft-close drawer. They had the same outer dimension, but the drawer that was basically a box that slides out on waxed wooden glides (that extend about an eighth of an inch from the box, on the bottom) had more than twice the internal capacity.
I guess if you live in a McMansion and you have more space than you know what to do with, that’s not a problem. But while my house is large, it was built in the 50s, and nothing is as large as in modern construction. (I have a lovely yard, instead.)
The second thing is that I find them disconcerting. I try to actually close them, and they are hard as hell to push closed, because they want to do it themselves. So I don’t quite close them, and I feel like I’m leaving the space unfinished. I suppose if I only had soft-close cabinets I would eventually get used to them, and who knows, maybe I would grow to prefer them. But I’ve had these for 4 or 5 years now, and I still hate them. It’s just an uncomfortable interaction every time I close the drawer.
They are also weirdly difficult to start opening, but that doesn’t bother me as much.
I hadn’t thought about all-wood construction, I don’t think I’ve seen that used on any modern cabinetry. But I’m familiar with it, my dresser is ~140 years old so I see it daily. Yep, drawer slides take up space - soft-close don’t generally take up more space than regular slides, but they both eat up about a half inch on either side. Some go on bottom and would eat up a half inch of depth. Either way.
You could likely remove your soft close mechanisms if you hate them. Many of them just screw in place, though removing them might allow the drawer to go into the cabinet so you’d need some kind of stop installed.
I talked with the carpenter about it. He did remove the soft-close hardware on the cabinets, but we agreed it would be awkward to do so with the drawers.
My drawers are solid wood, by the way, except for the metal mechanism. It’s a decent quality wood, too. I’m guessing birch.
The interior really is less than half the volume of an old-fashioned drawer without hardware. And the outer dimensions of the two were identical. I took a photo to show the contractor. I wonder if i still have it.
Yeah, long story short, my new vanity (pictured above) has drawer slides, and the sides of the drawer are made from thick oak (massive overkill). If it was all wood construction with thinner stock, the drawers would hold about twice as much.
I don’t have much to store in the bathroom so I was prioritizing the look of the piece and the quality of construction over storage space. My wife has more things to store, and her vanity is larger and with more storage.